XpoLog – Turning Log Data into Action

XpoLog, a privately held software company and recent receiver of the “Cool Vendor” title from Gartner Inc., has created a tool that truly understands log data, unlocks its hidden value, and helps companies find, troubleshoot, and visualize critical information, whether in local storage, or in the cloud. With its unique technology, and specifically the Analytical Search engine, it can effectively deal with any type of log or machine data, even custom applications like home-grown applications.

The Analytic Search engine is automatic and has been enhanced with a new technology that layers analytic insights in the context of data analysis, to better help extract meaningful intelligence from log data on a whole new level of efficiency and accuracy. XpoLog’s analysis team realized that the old manual data analysis solutions, especially with home grown technology and cloud deployments, had been too time consuming. The enhanced Analytic Search engine layers automated intelligence in the context of user searches. Analytic Search proactively scans log data and correlates these analytics layers. You can leverage the technology in IT Operations, DevOps, APM, Development, Testing, and Security Log management.

Visualization Options

In addition to the enhancements of the Analytics Search engine, XpoLog V6 focuses on expanding the visualization options to make it easier to analyze your log data, creating a context of virtual application structures that enable applications and operation groups to organize data in the context of business services. By virtualizing the data sources in logical application structures, various groups can build advanced analytics and seamlessly move back and forth between pre-production and production. In order to support the growing demand for data visualization, XpoLog V6 has over 20 new visual components and new ways to present data.

The image below (Figure 1) is an example of a result set that aggregated and computed the avg. memory consumption and total memory usage of two application servers. In this example, we wanted to monitor our application server memory consumption to avoid spikes that might crash one of the clusters. Choosing the right visualization tools, and in this case, intervals, makes a big difference.

Figure 1

Gadget 1 (bottom middle) shows the totals over a 24 hour aggregated memory consumption at 1 hour intervals. This gadget shows both servers. Gadgets 2 and 3 represent the same data but for each individual server. Once we split the data for each server we can see that each of the servers has a different memory consumption pattern.

An hourly aggregation for memory is not accurate enough, as memory changes at a much faster rate. On the upper row we see the totals for both servers (gadget 4) and two additional gadgets, 5 and 6, representing each server at 1 min intervals.

Advanced analytics and more powerful visualization tools for log data are major requirements for log management solutions. There are even organizations who add XpoLog Analytic Search on top of their existing log management deployment, such as open source platforms, in order to extract more value from their IT.

Ops View

In addition to the optimized Analytic Search with many more analytic layers, there is another new feature called the Ops View. This is one of the many new virtualization gadgets. Different Operational groups require different tools, and also different views.

The teams at the NOC, Operations, DevOps, SOC, or High availability control rooms need ongoing status screens of various managed environments. The ongoing streaming of status views is very different from a single dashboard view or a search console. XpoLog V6 allows you to select multiple dashboards and run them as slideshows. You can build visual dashboards for security, performance, errors, business statistics, and any other view you may need.

You can build Availability and Business slideshow Views for application and business owners, or R&D, Development, and Testing dashboards and let them slide in the meeting rooms. This way, Operations, Security, and DevOps can build multiple dashboards and Apps that provide continuous feedback on applications and systems.

Figure 2

You can even select a “night mode” theme in the dashboard view that will invert the colors of the visualization views (see Figure 2). This is useful for those NOC technicians monitoring in dark control rooms. It is much more comfortable for the eyes. After all, red shift does not have to mean red eyes…

Gartner’s “Cool Vendor”

Two months ago, XpoLog was included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in IT Operations Analytics, 2015” report by Will Capelli and Colin Fletcher. Gartner Inc. is a world leading IT technology research and advisory company. Vendors selected for the Gartner “Cool Vendor” report are known to be innovative, impactful and intriguing.

The XpoLog team were of course very happy to be included in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner, and consider this title yet another confirmation that the focus on advanced analytics and search for IT data helps their customers turn silos of unstructured data into meaningful intelligence and actions. With the launch of the V6 version, XpoLog hopes their product will revolutionize the speed and analysis of big IT data.

For more information about the XpoLog Log Analysis Platform, please email sales@xpolog.com.

About Me

Wendy Neal

I am a .NET SharePoint Developer for DMI. I've worked with SharePoint since 2007. I love to share my passion for SharePoint and Office 365 by speaking at various industry and user group events, as well as writing articles for various publications and this blog.
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